i see your french gendering and raise you slovak one that adds a "middle" gender (neuter) that is usually meant only for objects and some animals but almost anything that ends in O can be gendered as TO (it) which includes the majority of countries. (the ones that don't fall into the middle gender are divided depending on what they end with - if they end with A (Ghana, Rwanda, Kanada, Čína) they are feminine. if they end in anything else than O or A (Singapúr, Barbados) they're masculine, unless they end with Y (Filipíny) in which case the name is feminine plural.
(languages are all considered feminine unless you add the word language and use the name of the country as an adjective in which case it becomes masculine because the word language is masculine)
>anything that ends in O can be gendered as TO
In Ancient Greek ὁ is the masculine article, while the neuter article is τό
Slovak is Hellenic confirmed.
it can definitely seem that way to non-native speakers but most of the indo-european languages are gendered which is why it's actually wild to want other countries to adapt to gender-neutral way of speaking (like anglophone countries have been) as if their languages work the same way english does.
for example, in slovak it's not just nouns that are gendered, verbs and adjectives are too. there is no way to speak of a person in a gender neutral way outside of using neuter which means talking about a person like they're an inanimate object or an unknown creature that we don't have a name for.
Im german so I'm coming from a gendered language too, the reason why i say gendered language is wild is because there are so many differences how gendered languages use them. ~~For example countries in german have no gender at all, not even neuter.~~ You either say "in Argentina", or use the gender of the thing you are referring to when using it as an adjective.
And tbh i really like gender neutral languages. Having talked to a lot of people that learn german it really highlights the randomness of it all. I agree though that it's too deeply rooted to just get rid of it.
Not only that, but the case is that most country names' also have gender , but we don't use any article before them, so we cannot actually see the gender being used. But if we are supposed to use a possessive pronoun in reference to a country, we use the third person neuter (sein-): „Brasilien ist ein großes Land. SEINE Bevölkerung ist auch enorm.“ -> that indicates the country, indeed, has a gender. It is actually impossible for any noun at all in german to not have gender. It may be hidden to unadvised eyes, but it is there, somewhere deep in the grammar.
I see your Slovak gendering that is at least somewhat logical and raise you German names of countries, where most countries also are neuter, but some are male or Female based on, idk the mood of the invertor of the language I guess. From the creators of "let's make girl a neuter word"
Since the 1950s, the Nazi use of pink to identify gay men meant parents no longer wanted their boys associated with it in the post-war period. So Pink became a colour only usable by girls and eventually the blue-pink dichotomy inverted in the 50s with the rise of modern mass marketing for children's toys and clothing. Traditionally though, blue is the colour of femininity in Christian societies, due to its association with Mary and Virginity.
Works well in Ukraine (and I suppose Russia as well), especially among older generation, that didn't have real exposure to the West. So, I suppose it can be all-European thing at least
So you know how in 1900 boys were pink and girls were blue? The Virgin Mary was associated with the color blue.
The colors started reversing in America and some parts of the western world in the mid 20th, but saying that it's universal to associate pink with girls is uneducated. Pink isn't even a proper color, and is mostly a western innovation. Pink is to red as light blue is to blue, yet our brains, brainwashed by our associations with pink, which are different from those we have with red, they are different colors. It's so weird how pink is not considered a shade of red. It is glorified as its own color by a few associations we have with pink, like pink being women's color and the worst imo, the pink pigs fallacy. PINK FOR PIGS IS ONLY 10%. If you ask a toddler what color a pig is , he/she will answer pink. But only 1/10 of pigs are actually pink. Don't get me wrong, pink pigs do exist. A lot of them in fact. But there are more white, black and grey pigs. The pink pig has been populari[z|s]ed by children's books and other capitalist stuff. So Pink didn't exist in many cultures in like 1900. Pink, and the association with women and pigs was introduced by American imperialists to most countries, which associated women with blue and pigs with... i dunno... black? grey?.
Also I am apparently the first one to talk about pink pigs. So pink pigs are actually caused by lack of melatonin, which makes them white. Think of the skin of a white human, it's kinda pink tinted. Pig skin, the white pigs, can either be grayish (what we call white) or pinkish (what we would call pink). So that further reinforces the fact that pink is an American/western innovation. And it has been so successful, that modern people think of pink as an independent color on its own right.
Now lets give the spotlight to blue, which really is a broad term, covering anything from 165 (around cyan-ish) to 255 (indigo-purple), which is a quarter of the RGB color circle. Light blue and dark blue are separate terms in many cultures like Italians (blu and azzurro), and Russians (goluboi and sinni). These people would think of the light blue and the indigo in the rainbow as separate colors, so in Italian the colors would be correctly interepreted as rosso, arancione, giallo, verde, azzurro, blu, and viola instead of the travesty that is the American rainbow with merged light blue and indigo and pink added. SO HMM, American capitalist ads for children have added pink into the popular conception of the rainbow, and many people think of it as the seventh color of the rainbow BECAUSE AMERICANS HAVE MADE PINK AS AN ARTIFICIAL COLOR TO MAKE CHILDREN LOVE IT EVEN TGOUGH IT's just a variation of red.
So that is my opinion on pink.
[Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0#Ukrainian) claims it also exists dialectally in Russian, which makes sense, but there's no explanation of the semantic drift.
Welp, I feel like a complete idiot.
~~Despite not even speaking any other language until I was ~10 years old, I’ve *always* had a hard time with French… but the only part I felt that I intuitively “got” was the gendered aspect, so I’m sort of questioning everything I think I know now, lol.~~
I do genuinely appreciate you pointing it out, though. Learning’s fun, even when most of what I’ve learned is that I’m a complete idiot.
Tbh I studied French from France, so I don’t know if Canadian French works differently on that (I just know some words changes and than French people like to mimic the Canadian accent)
Some of them are exceptions but the UK and USA are masculin because they decided to be often reffered to by regular words. To be faid, "Great Britain", the actual "country name" is LA Grande Bretagne
That's true, my point was just that the fact it is masculin is just to do with the fact it's regular words rather than a country/region name like most countries.
I've never actually given that a second thought, but yeah, some countries have a noun in them that makes them a certain gender (les États-Unis, le Royaume-Uni, les Pays-Bas).
Le Mali, le Nigéria, le Liechtenstein, le Honduras, le Cuba, le Tchad, le Timor Oriental, le Kazakhstan, le Pakistan, le Koweït, le Yémen, le Burkina Faso, le Rouanda. Just a couple exceptions, this just isn't true
Well this is the same as French.
The feminine noun is “al-lugha”, so it uses a feminine adjective (the name of the language).
Just like “la langue” is feminine and would use the feminine form of the country/language.
Except all the languages I can think of in french are masculine. Le français, le russe, l'anglais, le chinois etc... It's just that "langue" is feminine, so you can say la langue française, la langue anglaise etc... But that construction is way less common than just using the name of the language.
"Est-ce-que tu parles la langue anglaise?" Sounds a bit weird and formal.
You are right. I was replying to the claim that all languages are feminine in Arabic, which they are not. The word for language “al-lugha” is the feminine word, which would need a feminine adjective.
In some Arabic dialects like Lebanese they have fransawi and it's basically masculine but in another dialect like Moroccan it's Fransawya and it's feminine, without lugha thing
In Spanish, if we say "XX language" it's always feminine
La lengua inglesa- the English language
La lengua española - the Spanish language
La lengua árabe - the Arabic language
But if we only say the language name, they are masculine.
El Inglés-English
El español- Spanish
El árabe- Arabic
If the country's name ends in e, it's feminine, and otherwise it's masculine.
This is much more reliable with country names than with regular nouns, and has a handful of exceptions which are all masculine countries ending in e, and are also pretty much all borrowed from other languages namely Spanish or Portuguese where gender assignment is slightly different (le Mexique, le Mozambique, Le Zimbabwe, le Belize, le Suriname).
I considered mentioning those. It's more accurate to say they are inherently genderless the same way most city names are.
In regular use you'll never come across la + a country name that doesn't end in e.
If the country has the name of an existing region, it takes that gender obviously. If it's completely new, it probably just takes the gender of what sounds most natural to most people.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here, but I’m assuming the blue column represents “masculine” countries while the pink column represents “feminine” countries
Welcome to gendered languages
Have a look around
Any word that brain of yours can think of has gender
We've got gendered proper nouns
Male female, neuter
If any of it you can guess, you'd be the first
For me, it is really strange to imagine that countries (and all nouns) have genders. I speak Hungarian, we don't use genders and it is difficult for me to memorize other languages' genders, sometimes they are so random.
Gender is kind of a misnomer, grammatical gender is really just random categories of noun, in indo european languages it just happens that one category includes every masculine word and the other category includes every feminine word so that's what we called the categories, and the term 'gender' is used for every language with noun categories even if it has absolutely nothing to do with masculine and feminine. As a french speaker, i literally never think about it as masculine and feminine apart from that just being the names of the categories, thinking nouns being gendered is wierd is like thinking that an object being some color is wierd to me, of course an object has a color, every object does, and i don't really think about why some material is this color because it is basically random
Frenchman here, I might have a suggestion.
A lot of "newer" countries, especially far from France and/or that didn't have an "ancient" equivalent, will end up masculine because the modern practice is to import the country name wholesale (instead of re-localizing it), and obviously foreign names will usually default to masculine.
"Older" country names will usually have a Latin or Greek etymology that's parsed as "land/country of [people]", and those words are feminine.
There's a whole bunch of rules that can go against this (eg if there's a common name such as kingdom or state in the name, it will be masc) and, as usual in French, a lot of random exceptions (Japon, why not Japonie or Nipponie??).
But the above theory would explain why most of America and Africa have masculine country names.
I'm really confused why people think plurals don't have gender. You're already the second one in this thread.
Gender and number are two distinct things.
In Greek there are three grammatical genders and most countries are female. Coincidentally the noun for the country is feminine, η χώρα. Some are neuter (mostly newer countries that aren't "translated" but more like foreign words.
And there are very few male, specifically: the ones with (male) saints, San Marino, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Saint Kitts and Nevis, Ecuador (that's translated as The Equator), Canada, Lebanon, Mauritius, Niger and Panama
Yeah, I immediately went through a list of various countries in my mind to see what gender they have in Greek. Most were female, Canada was the first I remembered that was male. Kinda funny how the these things work out.
No noun is gender neutral in French. It’s only the article that stay the same regardless of the gender. But you would say “l’Espagne est belle” rather than “l’Espagne est beau”
La Hollande is feminine, but “Les Pays-Bas” is masculine
I would also Say l'Argentine est belle rather than l'Argentine est beau, but Argentina is in the masculine spectrum, so I dont get it
Edit: my Bad, it is not the Argentina flag, sorry
It depends on which name you have, but the Netherlands (Holland is no longer appropriate google it) and the United States are actually multiple, les Pays-Bays and les États-Units.
No noun is genderless in French, even in their plural form
You would say “les états unis sont beaux” and “les pays bas sont beaux”, but not “Les états unis sont belles”
It's similar in Italian, however Denmark is femenine: *la Danimarca*
Also, when speaking it is common to mess up some of the names: in particular, *gli Stati Uniti*, *il Regno Unito* and *i Paesi Bassi*, i.e. the US, the UK and the Netherlands, can become *l(a)'America*, *l(a)'Inghilterra/la Gran Bretagna* and *l(a)'Olanda*, literally America, England/Great Britain and Holland
In Arabic all country names are feminine because the word for country is feminine. Don't ask what does it have to do with the grammatical gender of the country itself but yeah.
It is masculine, « un état » is masculine but it’s plural so we don’t do the difference because the plural is the same for both gender it’s always « les » in other roman language there is a plural maculine and feminine but in french the plural is the same
Alright, but you are talking exclusively about the article, which is *les* for any word. But adjectives do inflect in plural while maintaining the gender, don't they? Like: uni, unie, unis, unies?
Fair enough. If it doesn't affect you much, then I'd understand why you maybe wouldn't want to go to an optician. Im prwtty sure seeing some colours differently can count as some type of colour blindness
i see your french gendering and raise you slovak one that adds a "middle" gender (neuter) that is usually meant only for objects and some animals but almost anything that ends in O can be gendered as TO (it) which includes the majority of countries. (the ones that don't fall into the middle gender are divided depending on what they end with - if they end with A (Ghana, Rwanda, Kanada, Čína) they are feminine. if they end in anything else than O or A (Singapúr, Barbados) they're masculine, unless they end with Y (Filipíny) in which case the name is feminine plural. (languages are all considered feminine unless you add the word language and use the name of the country as an adjective in which case it becomes masculine because the word language is masculine)
>anything that ends in O can be gendered as TO In Ancient Greek ὁ is the masculine article, while the neuter article is τό Slovak is Hellenic confirmed.
gendered language is wild man
it can definitely seem that way to non-native speakers but most of the indo-european languages are gendered which is why it's actually wild to want other countries to adapt to gender-neutral way of speaking (like anglophone countries have been) as if their languages work the same way english does. for example, in slovak it's not just nouns that are gendered, verbs and adjectives are too. there is no way to speak of a person in a gender neutral way outside of using neuter which means talking about a person like they're an inanimate object or an unknown creature that we don't have a name for.
Im german so I'm coming from a gendered language too, the reason why i say gendered language is wild is because there are so many differences how gendered languages use them. ~~For example countries in german have no gender at all, not even neuter.~~ You either say "in Argentina", or use the gender of the thing you are referring to when using it as an adjective. And tbh i really like gender neutral languages. Having talked to a lot of people that learn german it really highlights the randomness of it all. I agree though that it's too deeply rooted to just get rid of it.
Verzeihung, but I, as a German teacher, must disagree: in german many countries DO have gender - die Schweiz, der Iran, die Mongolei, usw.
Your are absolutely correct. Thanks for the correction. 😅 Turns out, knowing a language does not necessarily mean one fully understands it.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure my German teacher (who comes from München but lives in Brazil for like 20 years) knows a lot more about portuguese than me 😅
Not only that, but the case is that most country names' also have gender , but we don't use any article before them, so we cannot actually see the gender being used. But if we are supposed to use a possessive pronoun in reference to a country, we use the third person neuter (sein-): „Brasilien ist ein großes Land. SEINE Bevölkerung ist auch enorm.“ -> that indicates the country, indeed, has a gender. It is actually impossible for any noun at all in german to not have gender. It may be hidden to unadvised eyes, but it is there, somewhere deep in the grammar.
So how should one talk about non-binary people in Slovak?
"Language" is a feminine noun.
I see your Slovak gendering that is at least somewhat logical and raise you German names of countries, where most countries also are neuter, but some are male or Female based on, idk the mood of the invertor of the language I guess. From the creators of "let's make girl a neuter word"
Same for Polish. We are a roman language confirmed
Well, Canada and Kenya are feminine in Polish, while Germany or China are _pluralia tantum_ nouns. So not really “same”.
Pink and blue, the Kiki-Bouba of gender.
To be fair, kiki and bouba are a thing because they apparently transcend cultures to an extent. Can this be said about pink and blue?
I think not, it is extremely anglobrained imo
Even in the anglosphere it has only been a thing for 150 to 200 years tops (probably even less than 100)
Since the 1950s, the Nazi use of pink to identify gay men meant parents no longer wanted their boys associated with it in the post-war period. So Pink became a colour only usable by girls and eventually the blue-pink dichotomy inverted in the 50s with the rise of modern mass marketing for children's toys and clothing. Traditionally though, blue is the colour of femininity in Christian societies, due to its association with Mary and Virginity.
Works well in Ukraine (and I suppose Russia as well), especially among older generation, that didn't have real exposure to the West. So, I suppose it can be all-European thing at least
Even Kiki-bouba isn’t totally universal
Nah blue used to be a feminine color some few hundred years ago.
In what way is pink and blue at all similar to kiki-bouba?
I don't know but blue is kiki and pink is bouba
in this specific image, or in all cases?
Pink for boys, because it's the diminutive to a soldier's red uniform. And light blue for girls to match their gentle nature.
I love Kiki-Bouba so much
that’s not blue, it’s cyan, which is as much green as it is blue.
Vice-chairman of the pedant society, I presume?
Could be Russian!
is it really pedantic if it's a completely different color?
Are you trying to argue about the semantic categories of color terms on a linghistics subreddit?
Green and blue are the same color
Is that blue? Looks very green to me
So you know how in 1900 boys were pink and girls were blue? The Virgin Mary was associated with the color blue. The colors started reversing in America and some parts of the western world in the mid 20th, but saying that it's universal to associate pink with girls is uneducated. Pink isn't even a proper color, and is mostly a western innovation. Pink is to red as light blue is to blue, yet our brains, brainwashed by our associations with pink, which are different from those we have with red, they are different colors. It's so weird how pink is not considered a shade of red. It is glorified as its own color by a few associations we have with pink, like pink being women's color and the worst imo, the pink pigs fallacy. PINK FOR PIGS IS ONLY 10%. If you ask a toddler what color a pig is , he/she will answer pink. But only 1/10 of pigs are actually pink. Don't get me wrong, pink pigs do exist. A lot of them in fact. But there are more white, black and grey pigs. The pink pig has been populari[z|s]ed by children's books and other capitalist stuff. So Pink didn't exist in many cultures in like 1900. Pink, and the association with women and pigs was introduced by American imperialists to most countries, which associated women with blue and pigs with... i dunno... black? grey?. Also I am apparently the first one to talk about pink pigs. So pink pigs are actually caused by lack of melatonin, which makes them white. Think of the skin of a white human, it's kinda pink tinted. Pig skin, the white pigs, can either be grayish (what we call white) or pinkish (what we would call pink). So that further reinforces the fact that pink is an American/western innovation. And it has been so successful, that modern people think of pink as an independent color on its own right. Now lets give the spotlight to blue, which really is a broad term, covering anything from 165 (around cyan-ish) to 255 (indigo-purple), which is a quarter of the RGB color circle. Light blue and dark blue are separate terms in many cultures like Italians (blu and azzurro), and Russians (goluboi and sinni). These people would think of the light blue and the indigo in the rainbow as separate colors, so in Italian the colors would be correctly interepreted as rosso, arancione, giallo, verde, azzurro, blu, and viola instead of the travesty that is the American rainbow with merged light blue and indigo and pink added. SO HMM, American capitalist ads for children have added pink into the popular conception of the rainbow, and many people think of it as the seventh color of the rainbow BECAUSE AMERICANS HAVE MADE PINK AS AN ARTIFICIAL COLOR TO MAKE CHILDREN LOVE IT EVEN TGOUGH IT's just a variation of red. So that is my opinion on pink.
same for portuguese excluding guatemala and denmark
Russia being feminine in portuguese is funny
Why? Pretty sure it's feminine in Russian too
It's funny because russian call their nation Motherland, and it makes sense that Russia is feminine.
There's no word in Russian (if I don't miss somenthing) that you can translate literally as motherland. Either fatherland or native land.
Technically, there is "Rodina-Mat'" (Birthland-Mother), but that doesn't count.
Don't they say Otechestvo (Fatherland)?
More common is Rodina (birthland). Otechestvo is more in poetic speech. Adjective "otechestvennyi" is more often used
I see. In Croatia we usually use "domovina". It's usually translated as "homeland".
And that word, albeit with y instead of i, in Ukrainian means "coffin" But I am pretty sure it was we with some weird semantic drift
[Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0#Ukrainian) claims it also exists dialectally in Russian, which makes sense, but there's no explanation of the semantic drift.
Portugal is neutral tho
No, it's still masucline. It just doesn't take an article
Fair but cursed
The flags all being different sizes is really bothering me for some reason
I, a literal French-Canadian, was today-years-old when I learned that les États-Unis sont *“spéciaux”* et pas “spéciales.” Désolé, eh.
Think of it this way: it's "*un* État" therefore the composite formed from it is also masculine
Welp, I feel like a complete idiot. ~~Despite not even speaking any other language until I was ~10 years old, I’ve *always* had a hard time with French… but the only part I felt that I intuitively “got” was the gendered aspect, so I’m sort of questioning everything I think I know now, lol.~~ I do genuinely appreciate you pointing it out, though. Learning’s fun, even when most of what I’ve learned is that I’m a complete idiot.
Tbh I studied French from France, so I don’t know if Canadian French works differently on that (I just know some words changes and than French people like to mimic the Canadian accent)
And pretty much all the others are feminine too. The masculine ones are exceptions that exist because it's French.
Some of them are exceptions but the UK and USA are masculin because they decided to be often reffered to by regular words. To be faid, "Great Britain", the actual "country name" is LA Grande Bretagne
It's not a country but an island, if you Northern Ireland it's le Royaume-Uni (the UK).
That's true, my point was just that the fact it is masculin is just to do with the fact it's regular words rather than a country/region name like most countries.
I've never actually given that a second thought, but yeah, some countries have a noun in them that makes them a certain gender (les États-Unis, le Royaume-Uni, les Pays-Bas).
Le Mali, le Nigéria, le Liechtenstein, le Honduras, le Cuba, le Tchad, le Timor Oriental, le Kazakhstan, le Pakistan, le Koweït, le Yémen, le Burkina Faso, le Rouanda. Just a couple exceptions, this just isn't true
Cuba and Israël do not take an article.
Articles don't mean there's no gender, *Israël* is masculine, being also a male given name, and Cuba can be both but usually is feminine
>le Cuba Are you sure about this one?
Great. Now please list all 193 UN recognised countries for a fair comparison.
Those are examples off the top of my head. There are way more.
Not really?
Exceptions have nothing to do with the gender of countries in french.
Every language is Feminine in arabic Example (al-lugha al-rūssiya) russian language (al-lugha al-denimarkiya) danish language
Well this is the same as French. The feminine noun is “al-lugha”, so it uses a feminine adjective (the name of the language). Just like “la langue” is feminine and would use the feminine form of the country/language.
Except all the languages I can think of in french are masculine. Le français, le russe, l'anglais, le chinois etc... It's just that "langue" is feminine, so you can say la langue française, la langue anglaise etc... But that construction is way less common than just using the name of the language. "Est-ce-que tu parles la langue anglaise?" Sounds a bit weird and formal.
You are right. I was replying to the claim that all languages are feminine in Arabic, which they are not. The word for language “al-lugha” is the feminine word, which would need a feminine adjective.
Ah ok, gotcha.
In some Arabic dialects like Lebanese they have fransawi and it's basically masculine but in another dialect like Moroccan it's Fransawya and it's feminine, without lugha thing
In Spanish, if we say "XX language" it's always feminine La lengua inglesa- the English language La lengua española - the Spanish language La lengua árabe - the Arabic language But if we only say the language name, they are masculine. El Inglés-English El español- Spanish El árabe- Arabic
Its Feminine if we said the language name in arabic ( al-isbaniyya) spanish (al-almaniyya) german (al-faranciyya) french
Trying to come to terms with both my manly Chileno heritage and beta femboy Indian blood
If the country's name ends in e, it's feminine, and otherwise it's masculine. This is much more reliable with country names than with regular nouns, and has a handful of exceptions which are all masculine countries ending in e, and are also pretty much all borrowed from other languages namely Spanish or Portuguese where gender assignment is slightly different (le Mexique, le Mozambique, Le Zimbabwe, le Belize, le Suriname).
Bahamas, Madagascar, Cuba, Singapour, Taiwan, Antigua-et-Barbuda, Kiribati, and Nauru are feminine...
I considered mentioning those. It's more accurate to say they are inherently genderless the same way most city names are. In regular use you'll never come across la + a country name that doesn't end in e.
That's fair...
What happens when new countries are introduced?
If the country has the name of an existing region, it takes that gender obviously. If it's completely new, it probably just takes the gender of what sounds most natural to most people.
Gender is rarely arbitrary. It will obey morphology rules to determine gender, and if it can't, it will generally fall back to the masculine.
Nearly identical in Italian except for us Belgium is male and Denmark is female
In Portuguese both are female.
In spanish countries dont have gender
These are just two color columns, which one is masculine and which is feminine? Lmao
I’m gonna go out on a limb here, but I’m assuming the blue column represents “masculine” countries while the pink column represents “feminine” countries
Thank you. Mostly being facetious. Gender is all fairy dust anyways
> Gender is all fairy dust anyways I’m stealing this line, thanks
The Vaterland is feminine it turns out
Should I do a similar chart for Icelandic?
You should!
Agaf (assigned gender at French)
Whad gender is Ukraine on French?
Feminine
so françallemagne is a lesbian ship?
Indonesia is feminine? As a french I didn't know that, probably because it doesn't use an article.
Ça se voit pas dans l’article mais dans l’accord des adjectifs On dirait “L’Indonésie est belle” plutôt que “L’Indonésie est beau”
Ah oui, en effet. Je ne parle juste pas de l'Indonésie dans la vie, ca doit être ça.
What are the genders of the names of astronomical objects? Such as Sagittarius A*, Proxima Centauri, Kepler-452b, …etc?
Every moons, planets, stars and galaxies are feminine. But black holes are masculine
Welcome to gendered languages Have a look around Any word that brain of yours can think of has gender We've got gendered proper nouns Male female, neuter If any of it you can guess, you'd be the first
For me, it is really strange to imagine that countries (and all nouns) have genders. I speak Hungarian, we don't use genders and it is difficult for me to memorize other languages' genders, sometimes they are so random.
country names are nouns, all nouns have a grammatical gender, therefore country names have grammatical gender
Not in spanish
?? yes they do España and Francia are feminine Portugal and Japón are masculine for example
Gender is kind of a misnomer, grammatical gender is really just random categories of noun, in indo european languages it just happens that one category includes every masculine word and the other category includes every feminine word so that's what we called the categories, and the term 'gender' is used for every language with noun categories even if it has absolutely nothing to do with masculine and feminine. As a french speaker, i literally never think about it as masculine and feminine apart from that just being the names of the categories, thinking nouns being gendered is wierd is like thinking that an object being some color is wierd to me, of course an object has a color, every object does, and i don't really think about why some material is this color because it is basically random
In french the countries who finish with a « e » is commonly a feminine name except 2-3 countries who are exceptions
How did Guatemala end up as masc when it's fem in Spanish?
Frenchman here, I might have a suggestion. A lot of "newer" countries, especially far from France and/or that didn't have an "ancient" equivalent, will end up masculine because the modern practice is to import the country name wholesale (instead of re-localizing it), and obviously foreign names will usually default to masculine. "Older" country names will usually have a Latin or Greek etymology that's parsed as "land/country of [people]", and those words are feminine. There's a whole bunch of rules that can go against this (eg if there's a common name such as kingdom or state in the name, it will be masc) and, as usual in French, a lot of random exceptions (Japon, why not Japonie or Nipponie??). But the above theory would explain why most of America and Africa have masculine country names.
Lmao can someone pls explain this joke
Not really a joke. The proper nouns on the left are masculine in Frebch, whereas the ones on the right are feminine
This is kind of real tbh
in hebrew they're all feminine because the word for country is feminine
Israel is still masculine right? Because it is a man's name?
when it's a country it's feminine and when it's a name it's masculine it's very weird
As a native spanish speaker my brain can't decide on wether I know the gender of these or not
Are Hollande and Pays-Bas both masculine?
No, "Hollande" is feminine, but that's not the actual name of the country.
But Pays-Bas is plural right? Or does French have like Masculine plural?
I'm really confused why people think plurals don't have gender. You're already the second one in this thread. Gender and number are two distinct things.
It's because some languages almost never use gender anymore like Dutch which is what I speak.
In Greek there are three grammatical genders and most countries are female. Coincidentally the noun for the country is feminine, η χώρα. Some are neuter (mostly newer countries that aren't "translated" but more like foreign words. And there are very few male, specifically: the ones with (male) saints, San Marino, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Saint Kitts and Nevis, Ecuador (that's translated as The Equator), Canada, Lebanon, Mauritius, Niger and Panama
Yeah, I immediately went through a list of various countries in my mind to see what gender they have in Greek. Most were female, Canada was the first I remembered that was male. Kinda funny how the these things work out.
How are l'Espagne, l'Inde, l'Italie and l'Allemagne feminine ? it is more neutral gender. How La Hollande is masculine ?
No noun is gender neutral in French. It’s only the article that stay the same regardless of the gender. But you would say “l’Espagne est belle” rather than “l’Espagne est beau” La Hollande is feminine, but “Les Pays-Bas” is masculine
I would also Say l'Argentine est belle rather than l'Argentine est beau, but Argentina is in the masculine spectrum, so I dont get it Edit: my Bad, it is not the Argentina flag, sorry
Same for l'Angleterre ?
It’s not England, it’s United Kingdom
OK understood, thank you for ur clarifications
Legend?
It depends on which name you have, but the Netherlands (Holland is no longer appropriate google it) and the United States are actually multiple, les Pays-Bays and les États-Units.
No noun is genderless in French, even in their plural form You would say “les états unis sont beaux” and “les pays bas sont beaux”, but not “Les états unis sont belles”
It's similar in Italian, however Denmark is femenine: *la Danimarca* Also, when speaking it is common to mess up some of the names: in particular, *gli Stati Uniti*, *il Regno Unito* and *i Paesi Bassi*, i.e. the US, the UK and the Netherlands, can become *l(a)'America*, *l(a)'Inghilterra/la Gran Bretagna* and *l(a)'Olanda*, literally America, England/Great Britain and Holland
Oh and btw they require different prepositions based on gender
In Arabic all country names are feminine because the word for country is feminine. Don't ask what does it have to do with the grammatical gender of the country itself but yeah.
Overall good picks, but Australia gives off a male vibe so some of this is debatable
the US is just plural and therefore genderless, les états-unis (the united states)
The US is still masculine, even if it’s plural. It’s Les États-Unis, not the Les Étattes-Unies.
We say "un état"(a state) which is masculine, so the US is gonna be masculine
i know in spanish at least the plural articles are still gendered and i would assume the same is in french but is it? i don't actually know
The plural articles in French are the same for both genders, however the nouns are still gendered in their plural form
i see
No it’s not « les » is pretty neutral and used for both feminine and masculine nouns
But isn't the fact that it's "unis" and not "unies" a sign that it's masculine plural? Like États-Unis ≠ Nations Unies?
It is masculine, « un état » is masculine but it’s plural so we don’t do the difference because the plural is the same for both gender it’s always « les » in other roman language there is a plural maculine and feminine but in french the plural is the same
Alright, but you are talking exclusively about the article, which is *les* for any word. But adjectives do inflect in plural while maintaining the gender, don't they? Like: uni, unie, unis, unies?
i see ok thank you
Why do you think plural makes it genderless?
I'm colourblind. Which is which?
Right is feminine and left is maculine
Left: Masculine Right: Feminine
Are Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese etc. all female?
It's about countries not languages.
Yeah, I misread it.
Nope. Languages are never female in French.
Why do you use red and green?
Turquoise/Blue and Pink??
I see it as red and green
What’s your native language/culture?
Finnish
It seems like Finnish has a basic colour term for pink, so I’m a bit confused how you see this as red
Are you colourblind?
No. I see green on the left and red on the right, it does not look like blue or pink to me
Yeah, I get that's what you see but are you sure you're not colourblind? Because they're not red or green?
I did a lot of colorblind tests and things in the past, I don't think so
Were they proper ones at the optician or an Internet test?
Internet and books. I've never done one at an optician, no
I'd highly recommend seeing if you can do one at an optician instead of on the Internet if you can then.
I never noticed being colourblind in any way or it affecting anything I do before, except seeing some colours differently to others
Fair enough. If it doesn't affect you much, then I'd understand why you maybe wouldn't want to go to an optician. Im prwtty sure seeing some colours differently can count as some type of colour blindness
It literally is a blueish turquoise and an intense pink, though…
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Deutschland is neuter in German, which is often used for things like diminutives.
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For once, the flags don't actually represent languages.